Is Your Sense of ‘Urgency’ Really Just Anxiety?

A question that helps me see when I’m the one making myself needlessly busy

Jane Park
Forge

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Photo: Tom Werner/Getty Images

The old marketing adage that 50% of your money is wasted, you just don’t know which half, is doubly true about time. I know this because I used to flush half my time and energy down the toilet every day in the name of stressed-out entrepreneurship.

I thought this was just the price of admission for getting to build a company from scratch, raise tens of millions of dollars in venture capital, hire hundreds of employees and serve hundreds of thousands of customers. I worked ninety-hour weeks, and whenever I was worried about the future, I just stayed all night playing out more and more scenarios on ever sprawling Excel spreadsheets. I didn’t drink water because I didn’t have time to run to the bathroom between back-to-back meetings.

Or that’s what I told myself, anyway.

But now that I look back, I am beyond certain that at least half of my effort was wasted. And even though I couldn’t see which half it was when I was in the thick of it, I have a strong hunch about it now. The answer was never in the next Excel model. Or the slap dash marketing promotion.

To make wiser investments of myself, I now I ask myself this simple question: “What I…

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Jane Park
Forge
Writer for

Entrepreneur + Essayist. CEO of sustainable gifting company: https://tokki.com/. Speaker, writer: https://www.seejanewonder.com. Addicted to making meaning.